This week's sermon

 

LENT 3—Jesus met the woman at the well

          I want to begin with a bit of academics. It’s important that we are on the same page when it comes to the Jews and the
Samaritans.

          Jacob (named by God “Israel”) had 12 sons. They fathered the 12 tribes of Israel.

          Joseph, who’s 11 brothers sought to kill, was saved by God and he, in the end, saved the whole clan.

          Joseph’s two sons—Ephraim and Manasseh—were given a fruitful land that came to be Samaria.

          Later, Israel divided into two Kingdoms. The northern kingdom had it’s capitol in Shechem and later the hill-top city of Samaria. The southern Kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.

          In 722 B.C. Assyria conquered the  northern kingdom and took most of its people into captivity. Foreigners were sent into the land with pagan idols, which the remaining Jews began to worship along with Yahweh. Intermarriage took place.

          In 600 B.C. the southern Kingdom of Judah fell to Babylon and it’s people were enslaved. 70 years later, 43,000 Jews returned to their land and rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple.

          The northern kingdom—the Samaritans—opposed that. The Southern Kingdom detested the mixed marriages and idol worship of their northern cousins. So both sides had bitterness that hardened for the next 550 years.

          The gospels and Acts are always showing Samaritans coming in contact with Jesus’ teaching.

          The hardest person to love isn’t someone half-a-world away but your nearby neighbors whose skin color, rituals, values and customs are different from you own.

          OK, so in today’s gospel, the Pharisees had figured out that Jesus’ disciples were baptizing many Jews, so he and his disciples went to Samaria to put distance between themselves and the Jewish authorities.

          The disciples are in the city buying food when John’s Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well where he was resting.

          I say ‘John’s Jesus’ because Jesus is depicted differently in each of the Gospels. John’s Jesus knows everything. He is living out a script God gave him.

          He knows all about the woman he asks to give him water to drink. He knows she has been with many husbands and the lover she had now is not her husband.

          He then promises to give her ‘living water’ so she will never be thirsty again.

          Samaritans believed, as did the Jews, that a Messiah was coming. Jesus tells her he is the Messiah.

          The disciples return and are surprised to see Jesus talking to a woman. In the first century men did not talk to women who were not their wives. And they are further shocked to realize it is a Samaritan woman.

          She leaves her water jar and goes to the city to tell everyone that Jesus knows all about her and asks them if he could be the Messiah.

          Meanwhile, the disciples, not questioning him, offer him food to eat. And Jesus tells them he has ‘food to eat you do not know about.’

          “Living water” and food to eat we know nothing about—living food—is what Jesus came to give us. The water and food of heaven.

          Many of the Samaritans of the woman’s city returned with her and ask Jesus to stay with them.

          So, even though it broke the rules of the Jews who said not to visit or eat with non-Jews, Jesus stayed two days with them and taught them many things.

          Early on, I said that hardest people to love are those neighbors who are different from us. I’ll share some things about my life that shows that.

          I grew up in the southern most county of West Virginia. That county was 50% Black and 50% white. But I only knew two black people when I was growing up—Gene and Lillian Kelly. I only knew them because Gene worked in my uncle’s grocery store and Lillian was that same uncle’s housekeeper.

          My father was a racist. That didn’t help me.

          It was my senior year of high school before I ever went to school with any Black kids. The Black high school sent three male athletes and two smart girls to my school because the next year the White and Black schools would merge.

          In college I became good friends with a graduate of the Black high school named Ron Wilkerson. He’d introduce me to his friends by saying, “Jim and I went to different high schools together.”

          My first parish was an all-Black church in Charleston, West Virginia. And my two other full-time parishes had large Black membership. They were living water to me.

          I feel so fortunate having come to love people who were different from me.

          We all need to do all we can to get the living food of friendship with those who are different. We can’t be like Jews and Samaritans. John’s Jesus taught us that today.

Amen and amen.